I am an evil giraffe. But I'm trying, Nick. I'm trying REAL HARD to be the wizard.

If cleaning the bathroom is actually one of your chores already, then substitute some other necessary, but mildly tedious one. Anyway, just clean it and don’t tell her** ahead of time that you’re cleaning it. That includes cleaning the shower/bathtub and washing the mirror, by the way. All of this will take you half an hour, tops. Do it when she’s doing something else, then let her notice on her own.

One where I actually followed Megan McArdle’s chain of thought here without once bobbling. Or boggling:

I invested almost four years in an almost-great relationship that ended with me, shattered and tear-stained, deciding to pick up and move to Washington. You can hear all about it in this NPR segment from a few months back, which they re-aired this morning. Or you can read about it in my book, where I delve into even more of the gory details and deftly weave it together with the sad saga of GM’s decline, which happened for much the same reasons that my failed relationship did.

“Seriously?” you’re asking. “Love is like … automobile manufacturing?” Well, no. But companies are composed of people. And people tend to make the same sort of mistakes over and over. This particular mistake is so common that economists have a name for it: the sunk cost fallacy.

I will now act in blatant contrast to probably the rest of the Internet and not be bitter, cynical, and/or saccharine-sweet* on the subject. It’s all frustrated romanticism, anyway… and, fortunately, I am not a frustrated romantic. Besides, I have a biography to read.

Moe Lane

*Do people even really use that stuff any more? I suppose that somebody must.

I went out and took the older kid to the post office, came back, then spent half an hour standing in line to pick up our delicious Italian take out dinner; my wife bathed the younger kid so that I wouldn’t have to.